​I’ve been in Mexico City for the past month, and yesterday, I finally had the opportunity to visit Casa Azul, Frida Kahlo’s home and now a museum dedicated to her life and her art. Because I am a nerd, I opted to get the audio guide so I could learn as much as possible. In the very first room of the house, we were directed to a portrait of Kahlo’s father, Guillermo. The audio guide pointed out the curious background of the painting, regularly space orbs that resembled cells as seen through a microscope. The guide explained that, as a child, Kahlo had been enamored with science and hoped to become a doctor.

I was shocked by this new perspective on a woman who seemed born to be an artist; the idea that she almost went in a completely different direction felt at odds with the aesthetically complete version of Frida I’d come to know. But as I’ve talked about many times, we’re all far more complex and contradictory than we initially present ourselves. And so I’m enjoying the idea of Frida Kahlo, the artist, alongside Frida Kahlo, the doctor.

Kahlo’s evolution inspired me to look for other iconic people who almost didn’t end up in the profession with which we so fully identify them. Like John Grisham, who leveraged his 10-year career as a lawyer into his current profession as a celebrated author of legal thrillers. Or Vera Wang, who spent 15 years working as a fashion editor at Vogue before designing her own wedding dress and launching a wildly successful bridal line. Or Harrison Ford, who was working as a carpenter for none other than George Lucas who thought he would be perfect for a role in his new project – Star Wars.

My favorite story was about Jonah Peretti, founder of BuzzFeed and co-founder of The Huffington Post (and brother of comedian Chelsea Peretti – what a family). Peretti attended University of California, Santa Cruz where he majored in environmental studies. He then moved to New Orleans and taught computer science at a private high school before going to grad school at MIT. While procrastinating on writing his master’s thesis, he started exploring Nike’s new service for customizing your own sneakers. After submitting a few unsavory words that got rejected, he tried the word “sweatshop,” which launched an email back-and-forth with Nike that he forwarded to a few friends. The email thread eventually reached millions of people and Peretti ended up on The Today Show discussing labor practices with Nike’s head of PR, launching his career in media.

Like Jonah Peretti, Frida Kahlo ultimately found her way to her vocation by leaving room for chance. As a child, Kahlo suffered from polio and, while recuperating, she took to drawing pictures in the fog on her window to entertain herself. Years later, when she had to spend months in bed after a horrific bus accident, her parents gave her an easel and a set of paints she could use while lying down all day. There was even a mirror installed directly over her bed so she could see herself and paint the self-portraits she is best known for today.

As these stories and many of my interviews illustrate, we can only plan so much before something upends our intentions. Sometimes those disruptions are fortunate, like Peretti’s email thread, and sometimes they’re devastating, like Kahlo’s accident. But, fortunately, there’s no expiration date on choosing a different path. We can always learn something new, try something new, or reinvent ourselves. And in the end, we might find a version of ourselves that fits even better.

Bekah Rife is a vegan chef and cooking instructor in Venice, CA. And if she looks familiar, that’s because her twin sister, Rachel, was a previous interviewee on “When I Was 17.” In addition to hearing Bekah’s story, I’ve also had the pleasure of eating her food, and I can tell you firsthand that she knows her way around the kitchen. If you want to experience it for yourself, check out her recipes on Rife.Style, or sign up for a class the next time you’re in LA! Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

When you were 17, what did you want to be?

I was so sports driven that I just thought I would keep playing sports into my 20s. My dad was big into football. He got a scholarship to college and he almost went pro, so he always pushed us kids to be athletes. I was doing water polo, synchronized swimming, and speed swimming. I didn't really consider life outside of sports.

There was a neighborhood pool around the corner from the house that we grew up in. We started summer recreation swimming there at age five. Then my dad would go on these long bike rides and he saw this pool where girls were doing synchronized swimming. He told my mom that he thought Rachel and I should start synchronized swimming. Twins are pretty coveted in the sport because they're perfectly matched.

I definitely didn't like it at first. I wanted to quit. But we were taught not to quit things. There's so much technique you have to learn, so many different skills and elements, to even be able to do something that looks like you're a synchronized swimmer. But then I really started to excel and it's fun to be good at things, you know? So I stuck with it.

Then I started playing water polo in high school and I really fell in love with it. So I thought, “Hey, it's not like I have to be the best in the nation, but there are these teams that travel around the world and play water polo,” and that sounded cool to me.

How did you decide to attend San Diego State University?

I visited San Diego frequently growing up because of swim competitions, so it was always ingrained in my mind as this warm paradise with palm trees. And being from Northern California, it's a very different landscape. It was definitely the goal to get a scholarship and play sports in San Diego, so it was neat when that happened.

I did both swimming and water polo in college. It was really intense. I liked the teammates and the camaraderie, but I was really glad when it was over. It's just very, very demanding. Sports is what I knew, but I think realizing that there was this big world out there besides sports was really exciting.

How did you choose your major?

I didn't really have much guidance from my parents as to what my interests were beyond sports, and I hadn’t done much self-exploration. Both of my parents were business management majors, so they both advised me to major in business because it's broad. So I did.

But I think I would do it a little differently if I had it to do over. I would definitely have sat with myself a little more and thought about my interests beyond sports. I think now I would get into something involving nutrition or health.

I did enjoy some of it. I had a lot of athletes in my classes, so we all bonded together and had a lot of fun. And I really enjoyed my electives like Spanish and women's studies and studying abroad in Valencia, Spain.

How did you get from college to where you are now?

I graduated from SDSU and that was really when my soul searching started to take place. I was just thinking, “What am I doing? What do I want to do?” I worked in restaurants for a bit, just to figure it out, because I had no idea. I also worked in VIP guest services at a hotel. And I did some traveling for a couple of years to sort it out. I did a trip to South East Asia, a few places in Central America, I lived in Australia for a summer, I did a couple of Burning Man's. I just really explored.

Then I did a competitive synchronized swimming competition in the South Pacific,which was super fun. So I picked up synchronized swimming again professionally. We started our own little group in San Diego and then LA and did music videos and movies and private events. We even had a full underwater gig inside the Dubai Aquarium - a mermaid show.

Then I started working for an events company, which I liked, but it didn't really feel like my true passion. When that company was downsizing, they told me, "You can take as much time as you need to find your next job," which was super cool of them. So then that's when I got into food.

I interviewed with a gentleman who had a rare autoimmune disease, and he was looking for a chef. I grew up cooking - part of my allowance was cooking the family dinner growing up - and I would watch my mom and my grandma who is a fantastic cook. I feel like the food thing was kind of in my blood because of my grandma, and that's where my base of cooking started.

So he hired me to cook for him. I was nervous, but I knew I could cook and the food I made always tasted decent, so I just went with that. Maybe it was one of those young and dumb moves, I don't know. But it worked and it went really well. And then he got a bit more sick, so he had a nurse there full-time. She was from Africa and she was a fantastic cook. Her food was full of all these cool herbs and spices and every time I walked in the house it smelled amazing. So that was good and bad. I had less work, but it also pushed me to figure out what was next.

Then I started cooking full-time for a couple. Their diets were a bit specific, so that took up a lot of my time. One of the women in this couple was a kind of serial entrepreneur and she had a tech start-up. Over time, she started to bring me into the company, kind of like her right-hand gal. And I still do that now.

Then I found this culinary program called Rouxbe. It's actually the largest online culinary school in the world, and about five years ago they launched a plant-based program. I was super stoked to find it because I wanted to go to culinary school but I also had to work full-time.

At first I didn't quite get it because the chefs couldn’t taste my food, but when we cooked, we had to take pictures of the stages of cooking. And then we had to be very, very descriptive about how things tasted and smelled and the techniques we used. I got so much out of it even though there wasn't a chef tasting my food in person. And I definitely got enough feedback from feeding the people that were in and out of my house.

I gained a real understanding of how to build flavor in that course. And I learned some of the science behind food, which has helped my cooking. And I'm just a curious person by nature, so learning the reason behind why we do things in the kitchen was fascinating to me. I also recommitted to the diet that I believe is the healthiest, which is whole food, plant-based.

The one area that I didn't get to deep dive into was nutrition, which is understandable because it was culinary school, it wasn't nutrition school. So I took the online Cornell Plant Based Nutrition Course, which was fantastic. I had a pretty good idea of how to cook for people with heart disease and diabetes and things like that, but it furthered my knowledge in that realm. I just wanted one more thing under my belt to solidify my education in the plant-based world, and there were so many good takeaways from that program.

This summer, I started teaching cooking lessons, which have been super fun.Sometimes with personal chefing, there is not a lot of interaction with clients or people; you just go into a client’s house, cook, and leave. So the food journey that I've been on has been making that connection with people and just chit-chatting about food. I felt like the lessons were the perfect way to do that.

I’ve got my menus live on Cozymeal, which is this app where you can have a chef come over and cook a private dinner for you. And then I also pitched my cooking lessons to Airbnb Experiences – it’s called Vegan In Venice Gourmet Cooking Class.

Sometimes I do the lessons at my house, but I also travel. Like last weekend, I did an 11-person birthday party and we rented out a big chef kitchen in Marina Del Ray. Or I had a couple celebrating their anniversary dinner at a nice Airbnb in Venice, so I met them at their Airbnb for their lesson.

It took me a moment to find my calling, which is in food and nutrition. It's where I feel the most excited and I totally see a future with it. I would love to reach a bigger audience and support more people in transitioning to being plant-based. I would love to host a vegan food show that blends traveling with cooking. I would love to be a resource to a greater group of people and support their journey to going plant-based.

Looking back, what seems clear to you now?

I wish I’d had more guidance from my parents or an adult role model who had said, "There will be life after sports, so consider what you want." It was such a stark life change to go from being a competitive athlete to stopping and not knowing what I wanted to do with my life. It was just so much to deal with at 22 years old.

Some real mentorship and asking kids, “What do you actually want?” would have given me a greater understanding of what life could be like. And then you can go from there and decide if you should go to college or trade school. Maybe I would've gone to culinary school right out of high school. And don't be married to the one job you get out of college. Use your time to travel and see the world because that's definitely part of your education and it will continue to form what you actually want to do.

I don't want to put down my journey and I'm so grateful for it, but I think supporting people to pause a little more and sit with themselves and apply that to the choices we make when we're 16 or 17 years old would be good.

I’m currently in the middle of Abbi Jacobson’s book, I Might Regret This, and like the television show she co-created, Broad City, it’s quirky and hilarious. But it’s also a lot more meditative and heartfelt than the stoner buddy comedy she writes, produces, and stars in. I got to see her on her book tour a few months ago, and she read aloud a short chapter titled, “All the Incredible Things I Did Not Do” that really captured the self-reflective spirit of the book.

When you tell people you are going somewhere […], you will likely be inundated with all the things you must do, have to see, cannot miss. […] [E]very single person had an opinion, to the point where they all canceled each other out. I felt pressure, as if the drive would be a complete waste of time if I didn’t cross all those things off my list and report back about my findings.

It was too much. […] I just wanted to be, without the stress of a to-do list. So, I threw it out. […] Maybe that means I missed out on the most coveted places those cities and destinations have to offer, but I found my own way. […] It was a mess and not perfect and all mine.

[…] It’s okay to not see all the art and not meet all the locals and not walk all the famous walks or hear all the indie bands in the coolest venues in town. […] It’s okay to not figure it all out. It’s okay to feel broken and alone and scared sometimes. It’s okay to not know everything. […] It’s okay if it’s not all amazing or incredible or spectacular. […] It’s okay to think it’s not okay. […] This went exactly how I needed it to. I guess it usually does.

While Jacobson’s essay collection was inspired by her heartbreak and subsequent road trip, I saw a lot of overlap with the ideas I like to poke at every week on this blog, namely the FOMO (fear of missing out) that pervades all of our lives nowadays. As Jacobson prepared for her road trip, she felt pressure to maximize every moment of every drive and every pit stop and every sojourn on her three-week adventure. But that would be impossible. You’re always going to miss something great, or have a mediocre meal that could’ve been phenomenal, or opt to go to bed early when you could’ve stayed out all night with strangers who would become your best friends.

In the same way, going down one career path means leaving other careers behind. I can remember realizing in high school that my opportunity to be an Olympic figure skater had passed. This was always a somewhat unlikely ambition as I’d only ever gone ice skating half a dozen times, but it’s the first moment when I can remember feeling like a door had been closed to me. And as we get older, we close more and more doors. Walking down one side of the fork means we can’t walk down the other. It doesn’t mean we can’t go back or change our minds or wait until we’re older to try something different, but, realistically, we have to say no to a lot more things than we get to say yes to.

As this year winds down, I’m thinking about my own path and the experiences that have led me to this moment. I feel far more delight than disappointment as I reflect on the things I have pursued and the things I have let go of. And I feel a lot of excitement about the opportunities yet to come next year and farther down the line. But the thing I’m trying to hold onto the most is Jacobson’s declaration that everything is okay: delight and disappointment, excitement and apathy, where you were before and where you are now. All of it is exactly what it’s supposed to be. It usually is.

Last week, I got to be one of the 12,000 people in San Jose’s SAP Center laughing and awwing at everything Michelle Obama said - also known as the book tour for her recently published memoir, Becoming. Michelle Obama’s nonprofit Reach Higher partnered with Collegewise (my parent company) last year to provide good advice about applying to college to as many students as possible. Part of that relationship included bringing some students and school counselors to this event, and I, very fortunately, got to tag along.

Most people are familiar with the Obamas’ origin story: how Michelle was Barack’s mentor during his summer internship at a prestigious Chicago law firm. But what was new to me was how that time was also a major turning point in Michelle’s career path. In her conversation with Michele Norris (of NPR’s All Things Considered fame), Michelle described herself as a “box-checker.” As an ambitious, young, black woman, she laid out a plan for herself and stuck to it:

Attend Princeton – check

Graduate cum laude – check

Attend Harvard Law School – check

Become an associate at an impressive law firm – check

But there were a few things she hadn’t planned for. The first was meeting her decidedly not a box-checker husband (She laughed as she said, “He didn’t know what boxes and checks even were.”). The second was realizing that she didn’t want to be a lawyer. She described sitting in her office on a high floor of a skyscraper in downtown Chicago, pushing paperwork around, and asking herself what the value of it was.

She talked to her family about her feelings and asked them if they thought it was too late to change course. And she laughed as she recalled the story for us, exclaiming, “Of course not! It’s never too late. Even if you’re 70, if you want to change careers, it’s still not too late.” So she went in a new direction. She worked for the Mayor of Chicago, then directed a nonprofit called Public Allies which encourages young people to engage in social activism, then worked to develop University of Chicago’s Community Service Center.

Michelle talked about taking the time to identify where and when she had felt happiest and most satisfied in her life, and how that led her to seek out jobs in community development and activism, especially on behalf of young people. And she took full advantage of the opportunity she was given as First Lady to expand the scope of that work to include as many people as possible.

Michelle Obama is quite possibly the most successful ambassador I can imagine for the idea that finding work you love takes time, and doesn’t always happen on the first try. It may not have been the most obvious path, but all of her collective experiences better prepared her to be impactful in her next role. Studying sociology at Princeton and getting her law degree at Harvard and working as a lawyer prepared Michelle to be the most effective advocate she could be for the young people and college students and Chicagoans she served in her career and the American citizens she served as First Lady. It’s not an original concept, the idea that the path to a satisfying career may not be smooth or linear; but hearing it from Michelle Obama made it feel shiny and new again.

Robyn Russell is the Director of Programs & Innovation for the Universal Access Project at the UN Foundation, and a fellow Loyola University Chicago alum. I haven’t kept close tabs on what Robyn has been up to since we graduated, but the snippets I’ve seen on Facebook and Instagram always intrigued me, especially in our current political moment. So I was delighted when Robyn gamely agreed to fill me in on the last 11 years of her life. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

When you were 17, what did you want to be?

I did not know. Is that an answer? Yeah, I had no idea. I grew up in a small town in Missouri and it was like doctor, lawyer, nurse, teacher, the things you learn about in kindergarten. I was in theater and debate and student council and dance and advanced academic programs, all that. I went to see my counselor, like, "Give me some advice. What should I do?" And my counselor said, "Oh, you should be an actress. Haven't you heard that Brad Pitt went to Mizzou? You should do what he did. I think you're really talented." And I thought, "What? Why would you give me that advice?" Needless to say, I didn't have a lot of guidance. So I thought I wanted to work with people and make the world a better place, but I didn’t even know the term social justice at that time.

How did you decide to attend Loyola University Chicago?

I was from Missouri, so I looked at schools in the Midwest. I thought I wanted to be in a big city, so we went to Chicago and looked at some schools. I liked Loyola because it had a really urban feel, the campus is pretty, and I liked that it was by the lake. And for me, it was very different from my small town. It was the diversity. And being a political science major, it was the internships. Loyola helped people get real-world experience and that was really appealing to me. Plus being in a city is fun.

How did you choose your major?

I think I was an English major and a theater minor at first, and then I added the political science major later and dropped the theater minor. Chicago was such a political city, and I took a class that showed me how you could make change on a large scale through the political process and policy and laws, and it was a new thing I hadn't thought about before. So I took one class and really liked it and decided to change my major.

Growing up, I was very sheltered. I was from rural Missouri. I didn't know any people of color. I didn't know any people from other countries. In Chicago, there were Filipino people and Turkish people and Spanish-speaking people and immigrants and brown people and black people. There are poor people in rural Missouri, but I didn't fully understand poverty until I got to Chicago. So being exposed to so many different challenges and so many different perspectives and so many different types of people, political science was a way to act in response to a lot of things that I had been unaware of previously.

I did a lot of internships - I'm a huge proponent of internships. I interned for a state rep and worked in the district office. For the first time, I understood what benefits the state could provide to people like electricity, food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, social security. So that was great. And I interned for EMERGENCY, which is an international NGO focused on rebuilding health infrastructure in post-war countries. I did a lot of work in Southeast Asia where there were leftover land mines, so they set up land mine rehabilitation centers and trained people to go out and find them, and helped them make prosthetics.

How did you get from college to where you are now?

My first job out of school was working for Greenpeace. It was a ton of fun, but I only did that for about six months before I ended up getting a job with Mike Quigley. I actually have Loyola to thank for that. I went to meet with the head of the political science department, and he said, "I have somebody I think you should meet." He called Quigley, who was an adjunct professor at Loyola, and said, "I've got a student here I think you should talk to."

At the time, he was a county commissioner, and I came on as a junior staffer.I was a legislative lead, but there were four of us, so I did a little bit of everything. What was cool about working in a super tiny office was that he was very trusting and would pretty much let me do whatever I wanted. It was great because I didn't even understand my limitations at the time, and I would go to these meetings with the Cook County Bar Association about digitizing all the court records and say, "Well, Commissioner Quigley thinks this." I was fresh out of school, this young girl with all these old men lawyers, but he had total trust in me.

When Rahm Emanuel went to work in the White House after Obama won, his congressional seat opened up and there was a special election. So Mike ran in the special election, and I got to work on that which was tons of fun, and he won. Then he said, "What do you want to do? Do you want to stay in Chicago and work in my district office, or do you want to come to DC and do legislation on the hill?" And that was a no-brainer. So I moved to DC in 2009.

When I was working on the Hill, I worked with the FDA on changing the lifetime blood ban on men who have sex with men. It said, essentially, that if you’re a man and you've had sex even one time with another man since 1985, you cannot ever donate blood. I worked really hard for about two years to get that lifetime ban lifted, and to change it to a five-year deferral, which is not ideal, but it can ramp down to a one-year deferral, and then eventually a behavior-based approach, which just means only deferring people from donating blood who engage in risky behavior. That was something I was quite proud to work on.

I left the Hill almost five years ago, and I went to the United Nations Foundation to work on international health with a focus on gender, on girls’ and women's health and rights. It's a little bit convoluted, but the US government is the largest funder of international women's health programs around the world, and funding for those programs is incredibly important for global development, particularly in low-income countries that really rely on US assistance to provide basic healthcare like contraception and prenatal care, and programs to end gender-based violence, genital mutilation, and child marriage.

Because I had worked on that portfolio when I was on the Hill, I knew how things worked there so I could design successful strategies to move the needle on those issues. What I mostly did for three years was grant money and think through strategy and go up to the Hill and do direct advocacy with congressmen and senators. But for the last two years, I've been working on a project with big international companies, so sort of shifting my focus. I work with companies that have large supply chains around the world to implement workplace health and wellness programs; think textiles, apparel, electronics, some agriculture like tea, coffee, cocoa, companies that employ a lot of women in developing countries.

The idea is that for a lot of these big brands, there's a return on investment when their workers are healthier; they're more productive, there's less turnover, less absenteeism. The thinking is that a lot of women have unmet health needs, so what role can the private sector play in helping to make sure that they have access to basic health information and services that they need to be healthy, productive people, and of course, healthy, productive workers.

I was really proud last year to secure 10 private-sector commitments to implement workplace women's health and wellness programs that we're now seeing come to fruition. There are tens of thousands more women who will now have access to care because these companies are stepping up in a big way. I'm excited to take that work forward, because I feel like I've really just dipped my toe into it.

I think a lot of jobs, you're technically performing, but are you doing anything that will actually make a difference? I try to challenge myself to really answer that honestly, and if I'm not happy with the answer, to change what I'm doing. That’s part of why I've changed jobs every two to five years in search of an impact. I have secured funding to do this work for two years, so I will stick with it for two years, but I'm also getting a second graduate degree. Here's a lesson for students: lifelong learning. You're not just going to go to college and then you're done, especially in today's economy. There's always skill-building that you can do, whether it's data analysis or AI or whatever the new thing is.

I'm getting a second master's in public health from the Bloomberg School at Johns Hopkins. It took me a while to figure this out and it actually took me doing work at the UN Foundation to figure out that I want to work on designing and reforming healthcare systems to improve outcomes. But I didn't figure that out until I was 30. And luckily I have a job that I can work full-time and do this at night, and I have a partner that enables me to change careers, and I have an income that enables me to pay for this. So I acknowledge it as a luxury, but I'm not satisfied and I'm looking to change.

Without getting on my soapbox, I think anyone who has done anything on public policy or healthcare knows America's healthcare system is broken and it's going through a time of really exciting upheaval. Compared to other sectors, healthcare is so behind on electronics, it's behind on customer service. There's a revolution of sorts going on right now to move from a system that is extremely expensive and delivers really poor outcomes, to one that can actually reduce costs and produce better outcomes. So that's a really exciting space to be in.

Looking back, what seems clear to you now?

I think that our society is moving toward an increased importance of data and the availability of data in all fields. One disservice I see is that women and girls are not taught to focus on math and science as much as we should. Or at least I wasn't. I think that making sure that students have a fairly deep understanding of statistics and data analysis, and the ability to use Excel and not just Word is going to be increasingly critical in any job, and I wish I’d had a stronger base. If you're in school and you're going to get a degree, focus on those hard skills. Those are harder to learn on the job.

And I wish I had been given a structure for how to think about what I wanted to do that was not so focused on a topic, like the way we have majors, but was more focused on a skill set. It would have been helpful if someone had asked me, "What type of work do you want to do? Do you love to just sit in a library and research?" Or, "Are you a super extrovert, and you love being around people?" Or, "Are you a big-picture thinker and you're really good at systems thinking?"

We don't necessarily design coursework around that, but I feel like so many people come to me and say, "I want to work for the UN." And I don’t know what that means. Do you want to work in the field? Do you get a lot of satisfaction from being with people? Okay. Then you should run a program. You should get program skills like how to run a budget, how to execute deliverables, how to design a timeline, program management skills. Or do you want to be a researcher at the UN? Or are you a mover and shaker and you want to be on the political side of things? Or do you want to go through laws with a fine-tooth comb? You can have a passion, but it would be really helpful if earlier on people started asking, "What type of work do you want to do?"

People change careers five to seven times in their lives, so just go and do and try, and you change later. It's fun. I've done that and it's challenging, but you can do it and it's more dynamic, I think. If you’re going to college, you’ve already got a leg up on so many other people, so understand your privilege and do something with it.

What is the When I Was 17 Project?

When I Was 17 is a blog series dedicated to collecting the varied stories of people's career paths, what they envisioned themselves doing when they were teenagers and how that evolved over the course of their lives. I started this project with the goal of illustrating that it's okay not to know exactly what you want to do when you're 17; many successful people didn't, and these are a few of their stories.